sovay | We're linking tongues and moving on

Most of today does not bear repeating, but in the afternoon my mother and I went to the Museum of Science and looked at the frogs: they were still beautiful. The dart-poison frogs, which look like metallic glazes. The waxy monkey frog, sitting up on its branch with delicate, unsticky fingers and opposable thumbs. Bullfrog tadpoles, fire-bellied toads; even a clawed Xenopus, whose name I learned almost twenty-five years ago from a children's abecedary, As I Was Crossing Boston Common. The Brazilian milk frog is the one that I love. Its skin is like celadon, softly watered with black; it crouches with only its throat flickering and its eyes are wide rims of gold. There are three or four of them near the beginning of the exhibit, the first frogs the visitor sees after the initial materials. I can imagine them in clay and faience. They look like things recovered from the ancient world.

On a channel that unfortunately cut for commercials, I caught the last third of The Magnificent Seven (1960) earlier tonight. I need to rewatch it and Seven Samurai (1954); I saw them both at the same time, probably not later than my first year of high school.

The Pliny moment yesterday was the Great Meadows of Arlington and Lexington, burning. Being wetlands, they should regrow soon. I still think conservation land should not be catching on fire. I imagine someone was smoking, and I wonder if I can invoke contrapasso against them.

There are not enough good stories with shape-changing and frogs.

Threaded | Flat

Weird. I wrote a story with poison-dart frogs and shape-changing in it a few weeks ago (alas, not really a good one--more silly than good).

And I know the abecedary you're referring to with Xenopus. I LOVE it. That's also where I learned Trogon and Yaguarundi.

sweet and slow, a circular tow,
round as the moon that leaned to blow
its beams upon Boston Common.

Edited 2009-04-19 13:48 (UTC)

clay and faience...

teenybuffalo makes some pretty amazing things out of sculpey and fimo clay. I bet she'd make awesome poison dart frogs.

I just watched The Magnificent Seven. A great movie. I need to get myself a dvd of Seven Samurai, which I haven't seen since college days.

But not a Pliny moment in the sense that you are not Pliny the ELDER in this case, y? I mean, you are not now in fact a smoke-tinged, hacking zombie, posting in LJ?

You would be proud of me. In keeping with the tradition of horrifying lullabies full of deadly things, I filked "Hush Little Baby" to the contents of Larousse Gastronomique, more or less, to friends' sleepless eight month old. It would have worked, too, if someone hadn't popped a party balloon.

Oh sad :-(
I was hoping to go walking there Patriots Day or next weekend

I'm surprised the wetlands would burn.... I biked thru there not long ago, and things did not look dry.

I disagree with you: Sometimes conservation land should burn. Isn't that what they found about prairies and Yellowstone? On the other hand, I thought that is more relevant to the Southwest than New England.

BTW: I talked/bragged about your Vanth [proposed] name to some coworkers Friday when we were swapping stores.

I read somewhere that the world's frogs are becoming extinct and this bodes poorly for our global ecosystem.

And speaking of critters ... Our sheep Chemaine just had twins black lambs. I have a photo up on my blog that you might enjoy, given our mythological naming hierarchy for black sheep.

It doesn't quite fit the bill, but have you read Are All the Giants Dead? (http://www.amazon.com/Are-Giants-Dead-Mary-Norton/dp/015201523X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240152818&sr=8-1) Mary Norton, Brian Froud, funny and melancholy and it always makes me want a hobgoblin.

Glad the frogs were lovely, at least.

Pity about the cutting for commercials.

I hope the Great Meadows do grow back quickly. I'd wonder if it wasn't smoking, or some stupid person making a campfire and not having any concept how to do it properly. Contrapasso sounds appropriate, yes.

There are not enough good stories with shape-changing and frogs.

There are never enough good stories with anything.

But yes, there should be more with shape-changing and frogs. It actually sounds like a good thing for Ursula Vernon to do at some point, once she's done with Digger, although she does seem to have projects coming out her ears already.

Well, given that the site's behind a school, it's probably a fire started by kids either deliberately or fooling around. I've heard that there's a big problem with that on the North Shore, actually: those damn invasive phragmites burn real well at the dry-stalks stage, fire spreads rapidly through them because of their thick, impenetrably growth habit. Very gratifying for the JD firebug. Cattail marshes aren't so dense and have water channel space, so don't burn so well.

On the other hand, burning off phragmites is about the only way to get the seed heads, and the beds don't support much other life (it's a monoculture and too dense to offer cover for water birds), so I can't be too torqued about that.

Early spring fire in a spot like Great Meadows should do no long-term damage. It'll green up in a couple weeks if you get some rain.

Now I've had to look up "contrapasso", and I like what I found. Hm. That explains so much about some of the more lurid images of medieval Hell.

I seem to recall a word for the holiday of the damned. "Refrigerium". I think. Does that mean that Judas goes to refrigerate himself on an ice floe on his one day off a year?

"The Hounds of the Morrigan" by Pat O'Shea has both shapechanging and frogs, though at different points in the story. The frogs are all comic Irishmen and there are two witches with a "Beware of the Frog" sign in their front yard. It's much, much better than that description makes it sound.

I love your entry title. That's my second favorite Robyn Hitchcock album.

and round they went, and round, although

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the Great Meadow burning

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